Interviews
‘There’s Something Wrong With the Children’ – Roxanne Benjamin Talks Evil Kid Subversion and Script Changes [Interview]
Up next from the ongoing collaboration between Blumhouse and EPIX is There’s Something Wrong with the Children, directed by Roxanne Benjamin (V/H/S, Southbound) and coming to Digital and On Demand outlets on Tuesday, January 17, 2023.
Benjamin’s new movie will later be hitting MGM+ on March 17, 2023.
In the film, Margaret (Alisha Wainwright) and Ben (Zach Gilford) take a weekend trip with friends Ellie (Amanda Crew) and Thomas (Carlos Santos) and their two young children. Ben begins to suspect something sinister is afoot when the kids behave strangely after disappearing into the woods overnight. If only anyone would believe him.
Bloody Disgusting spoke with Roxanne Benjamin about her latest, where she broke down the script changes, influences, and whether being entrenched in horror makes it easier or more challenging to subvert expectations in a familiar subgenre.
For starters, There’s Something Wrong with the Children opens with a stylish title sequence, which Benjamin attributes primarily to her love of Stephen King.
When asked about the title card and overall influences, the filmmaker answered, “Just across the board, Stephen King, and for the aesthetic of the titles when they pop up. But for the slow-mo running around stuff that happens at the beginning with the Sisters of Mercy song; that’s all What Have You Done to Solange?, where she’s riding around on the bike. It’s all in orange, and green was such a big color for this movie for me. Between the woods, the kids, their eyes, and all the stuff that happens using that color was very much a thematic thing for me. So, washing everything in that color in the beginning and showing the kids seemingly innocent throughout that title sequence was a fun thing that they let me get away with.”
The film takes place within the neighboring cabins and surrounding woods, but nearby ruins provide a source of horror. It turns out that the ruins weren’t initially part of the script but a necessary change from a production standpoint, as Benjamin explained to us.
The filmmaker chronicled the changes, “It didn’t start as them finding an old building. It’s them coming upon a big vista and a ravine. The movie was called The Ravine, and that’s what it was in the script, but Louisiana’s a delta, so no ravines in Louisiana, where Blumhouse shoots the series. That was a big change from the script where it was like, ‘What do we make this then since there isn’t that?’ The largest peak in Louisiana is right up by the border, and I think it’s 600 feet.
“We couldn’t go that far. We couldn’t go more than 30 minutes from New Orleans. So, one thing they have around there are these old forts. Fort McComb is one that’s been used in actually a lot of horror movies. But I shot it to disguise what it was and maybe make it seem a little bit different than we had seen it before in other horror movies. The stonework that leads up to the edge of the big hole into the earth is all built, and then the whole ridge around it is all built too. Then the rest of it is all green screen and VFX. It was trying to find something that would suit the story needs, but also that was available to us.“
Did the shift from ravine to ruins alter any of the story’s mythology?
“I think I had to change a lot of the mythology because of it being this pit and it being ruins throughout the story, to fit within that and what was happening with the kids. It was all DNA that was in the script. It was just tweaking it to fit with what we had, which usually happens in production anyway,” Benjamin detailed. “Then also, the way it was written, it’s written to a specific type of location in that houses were farther apart through the woods. There was a lake in the script. There are a bunch of different scenes that happened in the car. There was no garage. It’s all stuff that we had to figure out with what we had.
“This fit that bill, and I think it worked out to our advantage because both the houses are within complete view of each other, and there’s one shared yard between them. I think that helped us out and helped the story out a bit. I had a cabin I went to all the time growing up where my uncle and my family were always, and it was my uncle’s cabin. They had The Far Side driftwood sign above it. I worked that into the story too. The Far Side is the one cabin, then the other; I don’t know if you see it on there, but it says, ‘The Farther Side.’ It’s just a really dumb dad joke that I find hilarious. I try to work those into my horror movies.“
Benjamin’s latest suggests a conventional evil child horror movie, but it winds up subverting the formula through perspective shifts and unique mythology. Benjamin reflected when asked if working in the genre space and being a fan for so long makes it easier or more challenging to surprise fellow horror fans.
“I don’t know,” she answered, “That’s a really good question. Most evil kid movies are trying to solve the problem, which this one doesn’t do. Or it’s just a full gaslighting of, usually, the female character who’s dealing with this specific situation. It always feels like a supernatural entity that’s trying to be solved. A lot of them, even going from evil kid movies into teenage girl possession movies, always focuses on, ‘What do we do about this?’ in a way that this one doesn’t.
“It’s almost like it’s its own thing where it’s not trying to do anything about it so much. By the time you realize, ‘oh shit, he’s right,’ it’s too late. Then we’re just into, How do we get out of here? How do we get away from this with our lives?
“I’m a big fan of Village of the Damned, but that one’s obviously very much spelled out. And The Good Son. The Good Son’s a better one to think of in terms of this because you’ve got one character who sees someone for who they are, and no one else sees it, and no one else believes them until it’s too late. That’s a similar DNA. But knowing so much horror helps in terms of knowing what’s come before. Are you paying homage to any parts of that, or are you trying to subvert any part of that? The things I’m trying to subvert are just the gaslighting of the female character being flipped on its head. That’s the main one.”
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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